SPARC and FPGA

 

SPARC and FPGA

Abstract

There has been a lot of activity, in the FPGA world, surrounding implementing older systems to run legacy operating systems. Quite a few legacy operating systems have moved to OpenSource format. Fewer systems had moved their hardware OpenSource, but SPARC is one of them.

 

32bit LEON

The Space industry had used SPARC for some time. The LEON line of processors by CAES saw FPGA in LEON3, LEON4, and most recently LEON5 for SPARC V8 compliance. Operating systems are increasingly moving to 64bit only kernels, discontinuing support for 32bit hardware.

64bit OpenSPARC

One of the first Open Sourced hardware platforms was based upon the SPARC platform, OpenSPARC. Sun Microsystems released two variants: their OpenSPARC T1 and OpenSPARC T2. Some efforts were done with building 64bit OpenSPARC T1 Xilinx FPGA with 4 threads per core, where a single core is created, and multiple boards to create multi-core systems. Other efforts went into the later released OpenSPARC T2 FPGA with 8 threads per core, where a single core is created.

 

Documentation

The SPARC Trade Organization Specifications offer much documents to how the SPARC environment. Individual vendors offer their own, such as the home for Oracle Documentation and Fujitsu Documentation. Open Sourcing the SPARC hardware, offered an additional suite of OpenSPARC Documentation. There are projects which are dedicate to consolidating Open Source Core information, as well!

Conclusions

The modern world increasingly places FPGA's and ASIC's in the reach of common individuals where SPARC is a well-tested choice for mission critical enterprises, government systems, and off-planet systems. These platforms are very interesting for Open Source Operating System families, such as Illumos.